Square's current poster for Final Fantasy XI.

 October 17th, 2001 - Another Tokyo Game Show, another glimpse at PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI. Sadly more of the former as to this day Final Fantasy XI: Online still remains an enigma.

In fact Final Fantasy XI was pretty much a no-show at this years Tokyo Game Show with the promotional videos being rather tame when compared to footage shown at E3 and on the other side of the Final Fantasy DVD.

This time round, passers by were presented with some random person with a moustache probably talking about PlayOnline's interface and features. Oh, the drama.

Something of slight interest did come out of it all, and that was FF XI's new logo (take a look at the poster to the right).

Random geezer talks about PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI: Online.	Lots of text and stats.
The PlayOnline 'O' looking very... blue...	Player profiles - note the very Windows-like interface.

Originally scheduled for a simultaneous release world-wide 'late 2001', Square have put it back to a Spring 2002 release in Japan and a late 2002 in the west, although with Final Fantasy X not seeing the light of day until at least Spring 2001 in North America and Europe even that would be seen as pretty optimistic. In fact, Square's original master plan of having FF XI release cross-platform would have taken a bit of a beating after last week's news.

PlayOnline - Will it work?
Square still seem to be pushing for a subscription based service, payable monthly, for use of PlayOnline and therefore Final Fantasy XI. Other features are also planned to be featured within the PlayOnline software, such as web browsing and e-mail, but whether this will be a significant increase on the Dreamcast service remains to be seen. (Read: most likely.)

More interesting yet is how Final Fantasy XI and PlayOnline will succeed in places where broadband isn't quite as established as in Japan and North America (such places being the U.K). Although broadband rollout is becoming better in Great Britain, it would take a lot of sales of over-priced packages before PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI is a feasible idea. It will be interesting to see the situation this time next year.

What is Final Fantasy XI?

EverQuest? You can bet the FF XI developers have given it a whirl.

As for Final Fantasy XI itself, Square seem to be on a mission to remain as tight-lipped as possible. Apart from the few screenshots released on the other side of the Final Fantasy DVD (one shown to the right), not a sausage has leaked out since XI was first announced a year and a half ago. Sakaguchi has hinted at a few elements - such as the story and direction of play will be determined by the game and not the players themselves - but other than that we're completely in the dark.